Low-Tech Geekery Makes Beautiful High-Speed Photography

Vincent Riemersma’s beautiful time-freezing photographs are a mixture of skill and old fashioned geekery. The pictures show splashes of colored water frozen in time as they jump simultaneously from a row of wine glasses. The results are clearly impressive. But how were the photos taken?

First, the splashes. To ensure repeatability, time after time, Vincent built a simple rig. Two inline skate-frames and a piece of wood made a rolling trolley which was mounted on a slope. A marker at the top meant the start-point was consistent, and a plank of wood at the bottom stopped the trolley suddenly. Momentum takes care of the rest, flinging the colored water into the air. Capturing these repeatable spills was the tricky part.

Timing is everything. To capture the splashes, you need to have perfect timing. Vincent decided to let a computer take care of this, and used an Arduino to fire a flash gun. The trigger was a piezo-element which would detect the noise of the crash and fire the strobe. Into the Arduino Vincent programmed several delays. The first was to give the water enough time to jump from the glass (around 100ms). The flash would then fire, and be cut immediately. A final delay, of 4,000ms, is there to make sure nothing tricks the circuit into firing again.

What about the camera? Well, that’s the easiest part. The tripod-mounted Nikon D300s was manually focussed and had its shutter speed set to three seconds. Turn out the room lights and trip the shutter, and the sensor waits patiently for some light. Roll the skateboard and wait. The water spills, the flash flashes, the sensor records the image, and the shutter clicks safely shut. Easy!

The results show just how well Vincent set things up. More photos can be seen over at his Flickr page, and you can read his write-up, complete with all the nerdy details, at the DIY Photography blog.